Usually, when Los Angeles competes with San Francisco, the City by the Bay wins by flaunting its European style, quaint trolley cars and if necessary, a championship Warriors team that has reigned over the NBA while L.A. round ball teams flounder.

Continuing that theme, the two cities faced off four years ago in an inaugural City Nature Challenge, which posed the question: Which city could enlist more community members to count wildlife during a two-day period in April.

According to results released Tuesday, L.A. lost again, placing second to San Francisco, which also won last year. Although an impressive 1,555 Angelenos took part, that number fell short to 1,947 volunteers from the Bay Area — the most participants of 150 cities in the worldwide challenge.

Down, but not beaten, Los Angeles County may have had fewer lookers, but here’s the kicker: They found more wild stuff. L.A. posted 3,249 living species, slightly ahead of the 3,183 from the Bay Area, taking fourth place … in the world.

Not just movie stars

Tinseltown teeming with diverse wildlife? Surprisingly, the answer is yes. During the challenge, instead of selfies at the Hollywood Sign or in front of Randy’s Donuts in Inglewood, nature photos filled the phones of volunteer wildlife seekers.

“A lot of people have the perception Los Angeles is all about concrete, and the only reason people come here is to be around movie stars. But we are a biodiversity hot spot. We have plants and animals here that exist nowhere else in the entire world,” said Lila Higgins, senior community science manager at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum and challenge co-founder with Allison Young, co-director of Citizen Science at the California Academy of Sciences.

Only Cape Town, South Africa (No. 1), followed by Hong Kong and Houston found more species than L.A.

Taking a selfie with a slug

From April 26-29, so-called “community scientists” fanned out across the county, carrying binoculars and cellphones. Identification and tallying results followed from April 30 to May 5. This year, L.A. County sent folks wading into the tide pools of Point Fermin in San Pedro and walking the high desert’s Devil’s Punch Bowl. They scoured parks, hills, mountains and even the L.A. Zoo, where a gopher snake slithered past some wide-eyed participants.

Each living thing was recorded in a phone or camera, then uploaded to the free app iNaturalist. Once the competition was over, the science begins, Higgins said.

A pair of nanday parakeets on a tree in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, April 30, 2019. (Courtesy photo by Andrea Cala/iNaturalist)

Diversity within L.A. County’s urban biosphere is impressive, especially considering that 70 percent of flora and fauna habitat is gone — well, taken over by homes, shopping centers and freeways, Higgins said. But the observations and locations of actual, living organisms feed scientists new data.

For example, the discovery of two Hemphill’s Westernslugs set off alarm bells for scientists at the museum, who ran out to see these slimy creatures documented by community scientists to collect their DNA.

Turns out little is known about these slugs, except that they’ve been around L.A. County longer the Hollywood Sign — or people.

“There are a lot of things we don’t know about L.A., like where its plants and animals live. So we are amassing this data set to better understand Los Angeles,” Higgins said.

Several new programs eschew the philosophy that says introduced species are not worth studying. For each nonnative species found, such as the gecko lizard, scientists are challenged to learn how they adapt and thrive.

Greg Pauly, herpetologist with the Reptiles and Amphibians of Southern California has observed lizards mating as a result of the recent challenges, meaning they are reproducing in the wild.

Escaped parakeets and wild parrots

Likewise, Kimball Garrett, ornithologist and collections manager, launched The California Parrot Project in the 1990s, providing a closer look at imported red-crowned parrots that fly over the San Gabriel Valley in flocks, screeching so loudly they’ve been known to awaken residents from a deep sleep.

Kimball L. Garrett, ornithology collections manager at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum allows a child to take a peek through his scope focused on a rare bird in the San Gabriel River during a bird walk. (Staff photo by Steve Scauzillo/SCNG)

Whether they escaped from a burning pet store or a grandmother’s kitchen bird cage, no one knows for sure. But counting them and learning how they’ve survived in Southern California is part of fully understanding local animal biodiversity, Higgins said.

On April 30, a community scientist spotted a pair of nanday parakeets, a nonnative species, at King Gillette Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, a wild area 80 percent destroyed by last year’s Woolsey Fire. The pair was showing courting behavior, a sign they were establishing themselves.

“There was first a series of what looked like kisses, or transfer of food, very tenderly. The female presented her tail, and the male bird mounted her,” wrote Andrea Cala in the app iNaturalist, the observer who took photos of the parakeets during the challenge.

“It is one of the only ones (in that species, aratinga nenday) doing well in a natural area,” said Sally Marquez, spokeswoman for the museum.

Rare species attract attention

Kim Moore, a Long Beach wildlife photographer, made her final stop during the challenge at Wardlow Park in Long Beach where she photographed and identified a red-faced warbler in a sycamore tree. The rare bird had not been seen in the county since 2005.

A rare red-faced warbler seen during the City Nature Challenge at Wardlow Park in Long Beach on April 27, 2019. (Courtesy photo by Kim Moore, naturalist, photographer and artist)

“This was a lifer for me,” she said, adding it to her personal bird list. Others were adding it as well. The find attracted hundreds of birders, some driving down from Northern California until the bird flew away two days later, she said.

Contrast that rarity with the 574 times people saw the very common western fence lizard. Or the 233 people who saw the migrating butterflies from Mexico, a common variety called painted ladies. These made a big stir in Southern California this spring, at times coating vehicle windshields.

The count in 2018 had nearly zero painted ladies, showing how migrations of birds and butterflies vary from year to year and scientists don’t often know why, Higgins said.

“We found new species and introduced species that we didn’t know were here,” Higgins said. “Now we can locate them and actually take DNA samples. It is really powerful.”

Steve Scauzillo covers environment, public health and transportation for the Southern California News Group. He has won two journalist of the year awards from the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing on environmental issues. Steve studied biology/chemistry when attending East Meadow High School and Nassau College in New York (he actually loved botany!) and then majored in social ecology at UCI until switching to journalism. He also earned a master's degree in media from Cal State Fullerton. He has been an adjunct professor since 2005. Steve likes to take the train, subway and bicycle – sometimes all three – to assignments and the newsroom. He has two grown sons, Andy and Matthew. Steve recently watched all of “Star Trek” the remastered original season one on Amazon, so he has an inner nerd.

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